OBER-RAMSTADT, Germany — On a highway south of Frankfurt recently, Thomas Schmieder maneuvered his Scania tractor-trailer and its load of house paint into the far right lane. Then he flicked a switch you won’t find on most truck dashboards.

Outside the cab a contraption started to unfold from the roof, looking like a clothes-drying rack with an upside-down sled welded to the top. As Mr. Schmieder continued driving, a video display showed the metal skids rising up and pushing gently against wires running overhead.

The cab became very quiet as the diesel engine cut out and electric motors took over. The truck was still a truck, but now it was powered like many trains or street cars.

There’s a debate over how to make the trucking industry free of emissions, and whether batteries or hydrogen fuel cells are the best way to fire up electric motors in big vehicles. Mr. Schmieder was part of a test of a third alternative: a system that feeds electricity to trucks as...

WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy is heading toward an increasingly uncertain autumn as a surge in the Delta variant of the coronavirus coincides with the expiration of expanded unemployment benefits for millions of people, complicating what was supposed to be a return to normal as a wave of workers re-entered the labor market.

That dynamic is creating an unexpected challenge for the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve in managing what has been a fairly swift recovery from a recession. For months, officials at the White House and the central bank have pointed toward the fall as a potential turning point for an economy that is struggling to fully shake off the effects of the pandemic — particularly in the job market, which remains millions of positions below prepandemic levels.

The widespread availability of Covid-19 vaccines, the reopening of schools and the expiration of enhanced jobless benefits have been seen as a potent cocktail that should prod workers off...

When Salesforce Tower in San Francisco fully reopens this year after 16 months of pandemic-induced closure, one of its more unusual features will be found in the basement.

A series of pipes and cast-in-concrete holding tanks, arrayed on two levels in the parking garage like some hidden microbrewery, will take the dirty water generated by the structure’s daily operations through a six-step filtration process and return it as clean, nonpotable water for use in toilets and drip irrigation.

Taking up the space of 16 cars, the black-water system, so called because it treats all wastewater, including from toilets and showers, will filter an estimated 30,000 gallons per workday, or 7.8 million a year. The system, the most comprehensive of its kind in a high-rise tower in the nation, is designed for people to visit — each step of the process is labeled, said Amanda von Almen, head of sustainable built environment at Salesforce.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy is heading toward an increasingly uncertain autumn as a surge in the Delta variant of the coronavirus coincides with the expiration of expanded unemployment benefits for millions of people, complicating what was supposed to be a return to normal as a wave of workers re-entered the labor market.

That dynamic is creating an unexpected challenge for the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve in managing what has been a fairly swift recovery from a recession. For months, officials at the White House and the central bank have pointed toward the fall as a potential turning point for an economy that is struggling to fully shake off the effects of the pandemic — particularly in the job market, which remains millions of positions below prepandemic levels.

The widespread availability of Covid-19 vaccines, the reopening of schools and the expiration of enhanced jobless benefits have been seen as a potent cocktail that should prod workers off...

Some of the nation’s largest employers, for months reluctant to wade into the fraught issue of whether Covid-19 vaccinations should be mandatory for workers, have in recent days been compelled to act as infections have surged again.

On Tuesday, Tyson Foods told its 120,000 workers in offices, slaughterhouses and poultry plants across the country that they would need to be vaccinated by Nov. 1 as a “condition of employment.” And Microsoft, which employs roughly 100,000 people in the United States, said it would require proof of vaccination for all employees, vendors and guests to gain access to its offices.

Last week, Google said it would require employees who returned to the company’s offices to be vaccinated, while Disney announced a mandate for all salaried and nonunion hourly workers who work on site.

Other companies, including Walmart, the largest private employer in the United States, and Lyft and Uber, have taken a less forceful approach, mandating...

The S&P 500 rose 0.6 percent in midday trading Tuesday after the index ended slightly lower on Monday. The Nasdaq composite ticked up 0.4 percent on Tuesday.

The Stoxx Europe 600 closed with a 0.2 percent gain. Asian markets were mixed.

Oil prices fell, with West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, down 0.8 percent to $70.66 a barrel.

BMW fell 4.2 percent, while Stellantis, which owns Jeep, Peugeot and Fiat, rose 4.5 percent. Both carmakers reported large increases in profit in their quarterly earnings report on Tuesday, but warned that a global shortage of semiconductors is continuing to disrupt production.

Spirit Airlines and American Airlines canceled hundreds of flights on Tuesday after several days of disruptions, frustrating passengers across the country.

By midafternoon, Spirit had scrapped more than half its scheduled flights for the day, according to FlightAware, an aviation data firm. The airline canceled more than 40 percent of its flights on Monday and 19 percent on Sunday. Spirit attributed those disruptions to “a series of weather and operational challenges.”

American had canceled about 300 flights by the middle of the afternoon on Tuesday, about a tenth of Tuesday’s scheduled trips. The airline canceled about 18 percent of its flights on Monday and 9 percent the day before. American pinned the blame on a weekend storm that hit Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, its large hub airport.

“A prolonged severe weather event in Dallas Fort Worth on Sunday night into Monday morning brought sustained heavy rain, strong winds, lightning,...

WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy is heading toward an increasingly uncertain autumn as a surge in the Delta variant of the coronavirus coincides with the expiration of expanded unemployment benefits for millions of people, complicating what was supposed to be a return to normal as a wave of workers re-entered the labor market.

That dynamic is creating an unexpected challenge for the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve in managing what has been a fairly swift recovery from a recession. For months, officials at the White House and the central bank have pointed toward the fall as a potential turning point for an economy that is struggling to fully shake off the effects of the pandemic — particularly in the job market, which remains millions of positions below prepandemic levels.

The widespread availability of Covid-19 vaccines, the reopening of schools and the expiration of enhanced jobless benefits have been seen as a potent cocktail that should prod workers off...

Spirit Airlines and American Airlines canceled hundreds of flights on Tuesday after several days of disruptions, frustrating passengers across the country.

By midafternoon, Spirit had scrapped more than half its scheduled flights for the day, according to FlightAware, an aviation data firm. The airline canceled more than 40 percent of its flights on Monday and 19 percent on Sunday. Spirit attributed those disruptions to “a series of weather and operational challenges.”

American had canceled about 300 flights by the middle of the afternoon on Tuesday, about a tenth of Tuesday’s scheduled trips. The airline canceled about 18 percent of its flights on Monday and 9 percent the day before. American pinned the blame on a weekend storm that hit Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, its large hub airport.

“A prolonged severe weather event in Dallas Fort Worth on Sunday night into Monday morning brought sustained heavy rain, strong winds, lightning,...

Marriott International’s sales more than doubled in the second quarter from a year ago, the latest sign of the recovery in the hospitality industry.

Revenue rose to $3.15 billion in the three months through June, the company said on Tuesday, from $1.5 billion in the year-ago quarter. The lodging giant reported profit of $422 million, compared with a $234 million loss in the same period last year.

The company said that rebound had continued since June, with increasing vaccination rates and easing travel restrictions helping raise occupancy. Global occupancy grew to 51 percent in the second quarter.

“The rate of global lodging recovery accelerated during the second quarter and momentum has continued into July,” Anthony Capuano, Marriott’s chief executive, said in a statement.

The global car market is rebounding strongly despite shortages of key components like semiconductors. That was the message Tuesday from German carmaker BMW and Stellantis, which owns Jeep, Peugeot and Fiat, as both reported large increases in profit.

BMW said it made a net profit of 4.8 billion euros, or $5.7 billion, in the second quarter of 2021 compared with a loss a year earlier, when the pandemic forced showrooms around the world to close. Sales soared 43 percent to 28.6 billion euros, driven by particularly strong increases in China and the United States, BMW said. Both sales and profit were higher than the same quarter in 2019, before the pandemic struck.

Stellantis, the product of a merger this year of Fiat Chrysler and the French maker of Peugeot and Citroën cars, reported a net profit for the first six months of 2021 of 5.9 billion euros, compared with a loss a year earlier, after sales rose 46 percent to 75 billion euros.

The Stellantis figures are...

Shares of Tencent Holdings and other prominent Chinese video-game companies plunged in Hong Kong trading on Tuesday after a Beijing-affiliated media outlet called their products “spiritual opium.”

The blast from the state-affiliated media outlet, the Economic Information Daily, came after months of increased pressure from Beijing aimed at the broader Chinese internet industry, which serves one billion users. That pressure has moved global investors to pull billions of dollars out of Chinese technology stocks, on fears that tighter regulation could hurt company prospects.

The article from the Economic Information Daily did not declare that any specific policy changes would be made, and it was unclear whether it reflected the views of Beijing officials or merely those of the publication’s editors.

Further adding to the uncertainty, the link to the article went dead later on Tuesday, though a copy could still be found on the site of Xinhua, the official state...

The bipartisan infrastructure plan, drafted during a marathon weekend session in the Senate, may go to a vote in the chamber this week. It is just over 2,700 pages long, with allocations for everything from broadband and bridges to ports and pedestrian crossings, plus proposals for how to pay for it all.

You can read the entire bill here (before amendments), or get the gist from our handy top-line summary and links:

About $110 billion will go on roads, bridges and transportation programs. Pedestrian commuting, projects that reduce collisions between cars and wildlife, and a federal program intended to encourage children to walk or bike to school all get funding. But it adds up to a small fraction of what’s needed to address a $786 billion backlog of repairs for roads and bridges alone, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.

There’s $73 billion for a clean-energy makeover of the electric grid. That is much less than what President Biden sought...

SALT LAKE CITY — Tyler Holt summed up the problem his Utah landscaping business faces every year. “People who want to be in the job force want stability — if they want to work, they work full time,” he said. “Locally there’s just no workers who want to do anything seasonal.”

The complaint has been echoed not only by landscapers in Utah, but also by amusement parks in Wyoming, restaurants in Rhode Island, crab trappers in Maryland, camps in Colorado and thousands of other businesses around the country that depend on seasonal workers from abroad to work lower-wage nonfarm jobs.

The scramble for these temporary guest workers has been intense in recent years, as the jobless rate inched down and tensions over immigration policy ratcheted up. But this year, after the coronavirus pandemic first halted and then seriously constrained the stream of foreign workers into the United States, the competition has been particularly fierce.

The Biden administration responded to...

LONDON — A few years ago, Britain agreed to let China take an ownership stake in its newest nuclear power plants, figuring Beijing had the nuclear know-how and the construction smarts to help replace the country’s aging power stations.

It was a warm moment in British-Chinese relations, a deal signed in 2015 during a carefully choreographed visit to London by President Xi Jinping of China with the British prime minister at the time, David Cameron.

Six years later, Britain is having second thoughts. Financing for a planned power station facing the North Sea, estimated at 20 billion pounds ($28 billion) and necessary to ensure a steady stream of electricity for decades, is unexpectedly in doubt. Part of the problem: attracting investors to a project one-fifth owned by China.

Mr. Xi’s authoritarian ambitions and human rights record have chilled relations with Western nations, forcing a broad reconsideration of a range of economic dealings with the world’s...

The suits are returning to the office. In chinos. And sneakers. And ballet flats.

As Wall Street workers trickle back into their Manhattan offices this summer, they are noticeable for their casual attire. Men are reporting for duty in polo shirts. Women have stepped down from the high heels once considered de rigueur. Ties are nowhere to be found. Even the Lululemon logo has been spotted.

The changes are superficial, but they hint at a bigger cultural shift in an industry where well-cut suits and wingtips once symbolized swagger, memorialized in popular culture by Gordon Gekko in the movie “Wall Street” and Patrick Bateman in the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel “American Psycho.” Even as many corporate workplaces around the country relaxed their dress codes in recent years, Wall Street remained mostly buttoned up.

Two financial technology giants that are taking on the traditional banking industry are joining forces to build their alternative to credit cards.

Square said on Sunday that it planned to acquire the Australian “buy now, pay later” company Afterpay in an all-stock deal that values Afterpay at about $29 billion.

The deal introduces Afterpay’s service, which allows users to stagger the cost of their purchases over interest-free installments, to U.S. consumers and the millions of small businesses that process their credit card transactions on the Square app. It will also help the San Francisco-based Square further expand in Australia, its second-biggest market after the United States.

Square’s Cash App, a payment platform with more than 70 million customers, has been a key point of growth for the company, particularly during the pandemic as customers have sought out cash-free options. The company has been looking to integrate that app and its “Seller App”...

SALT LAKE CITY — Tyler Holt summed up the problem his Utah landscaping business faces every year. “People who want to be in the job force want stability — if they want to work, they work full time,” he said. “Locally there’s just no workers who want to do anything seasonal.”

The complaint has been echoed not only by landscapers in Utah, but also by amusement parks in Wyoming, restaurants in Rhode Island, crab trappers in Maryland, camps in Colorado and thousands of other businesses around the country that depend on seasonal workers from abroad to work lower-wage nonfarm jobs.

The scramble for these temporary guest workers has been intense in recent years, as the jobless rate inched down and tensions over immigration policy ratcheted up. But this year, after the coronavirus pandemic first halted and then seriously constrained the stream of foreign workers into the United States, the competition has been particularly fierce.

The Biden administration responded to...

LONDON — A few years ago, Britain agreed to let China take an ownership stake in its newest nuclear power plants, figuring Beijing had the nuclear know-how and the construction smarts to help replace the country’s aging power stations.

It was a warm moment in British-Chinese relations, a deal signed in 2015 during a carefully choreographed visit to London by President Xi Jinping of China with the British prime minister at the time, David Cameron.

Six years later, Britain is having second thoughts. Financing for a planned power station facing the North Sea, estimated at 20 billion pounds ($28 billion) and necessary to ensure a steady stream of electricity for decades, is unexpectedly in doubt. Part of the problem: attracting investors to a project one-fifth owned by China.

Mr. Xi’s authoritarian ambitions and human rights record have chilled relations with Western nations, forcing a broad reconsideration of a range of economic dealings with the world’s...

The suits are returning to the office. In chinos. And sneakers. And ballet flats.

As Wall Street workers trickle back into their Manhattan offices this summer, they are noticeable for their casual attire. Men are reporting for duty in polo shirts. Women have stepped down from the high heels once considered de rigueur. Ties are nowhere to be found. Even the Lululemon logo has been spotted.

The changes are superficial, but they hint at a bigger cultural shift in an industry where well-cut suits and wingtips once symbolized swagger, memorialized in popular culture by Gordon Gekko in the movie “Wall Street” and Patrick Bateman in the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel “American Psycho.” Even as many corporate workplaces around the country relaxed their dress codes in recent years, Wall Street remained mostly buttoned up.

Federal Reserve officials are divided over when and how they should begin reducing their monetary policy support as America’s economy rebounds, and they are increasingly airing their divergent views in public.

Among the most candid remarks yet came from Christopher J. Waller, the Fed’s newest governor, during an interview with CNBC on Monday. Mr. Waller said that he would support slowing the Fed’s big bond purchases “early” and “fast,” and he indicated that he would have preferred to first slow purchases of mortgage-backed securities — something Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, more or less took off the table in comments last week.

“The labor market should really take off starting in August and September,” Mr. Waller said, assuming that the opening of schools is not delayed by the Delta variant. If the economy continues to add jobs rapidly — perhaps at a pace of 800,000 to 1 million jobs per month — he said he thinks the Fed needs to get moving.

“In my view,...

The suits are returning to the office. In chinos. And sneakers. And ballet flats.

As Wall Street workers trickle back into their Manhattan offices this summer, they are noticeable for their casual attire. Men are reporting for duty in polo shirts. Women have stepped down from the high heels once considered de rigueur. Ties are nowhere to be found. Even the Lululemon logo has been spotted.

The changes are superficial, but they hint at a bigger cultural shift in an industry where well-cut suits and wingtips once symbolized swagger, memorialized in popular culture by Gordon Gekko in the movie “Wall Street” and Patrick Bateman in the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel “American Psycho.” Even as many corporate workplaces around the country relaxed their dress codes in recent years, Wall Street remained mostly buttoned up.